An enterprise may have a legal or other obligation and/or an internal policy that requires selected content to be retained in a particular manner and/or for a prescribed period. In some cases, more than one retention policy or other requirement may apply to a particular content item. For example, an email message may be subject to a general requirement that email communications be retained for a first prescribed number of years, but the same message may be required to be retained for a second, greater number of years by virtue of the subject matter, sender, recipient, etc.
Typical record management and content management systems do not identify conflicts until they arise, e.g., until the arrival of the prescribed time to perform an operation that is required by one policy and would violate another policy applicable to the same content. Typically an administrator must intervene to resolve conflicts, e.g., by telling the system which policy/requirement has precedence. Therefore, there is a need for an at least partly automated and more proactive way to apply and enforce two or more potentially conflicting retention policies with respect to the same item of managed content.